Rise up in darkness. Soon you will be gone,
And morning’s light is harsh. Your dower,
Your single night of burning, still lives on.

Above us now the moon has kept—drawn
By your beauty—watch through the midnight hour.
Rise up in darkness; soon you will be gone.

However frail your light, your fragile song
Of innocence, however brief your flower,
Your single night of burning still lives on.

You are pure transiency. While rook and pawn
Move in relentless ways, and moth devours,
Rise up in darkness: soon you will be gone.

Fixed by your perishable flame, the throng
Of shadows cast about us has no power:
Your single night of burning still lives on.

The place we are is now, and not beyond—
In blossoming, and not the petals’ shower.
Rise up in darkness; soon you will be gone.
Your single night of burning still lives on.

First published in The Formalist

Prophecy

They shall return, and by that cold light keep
To the woods’ edge, and the untrammeled vale;
The horse and gryphon shall together sleep,

Fixed in each other’s dreams, and in that deep
Transfusion, frame their forgotten tale.
They shall return, and by that cold light keep

The snow in trodden circles, while they leap
And shudder; reason shall be of no avail.
The horse and gryphon shall together sleep,

It matters not how long. The time to reap
Comes round at last: hammer discovers nail.
They shall return, and by that cold light keep

Strange counsel. Stranger still, on that steep
Mountainside, when all the leaves turn pale,
The horse and gryphon shall together sleep

Beside their hoard of ancient words, and weep,
And gaze out through the rain’s dark veil.
They shall return, and by that cold light keep;
The horse and gryphon shall together sleep.

First published in Iambs & Trochees

Flambeau

There, where the pool of mortal light begins
To gather, where the rivulet breaks free
To make a fire, a flame blows in the wind.

This is no easy rising—odds and ends
Of nothingness to stir, darkness to seize
There where the pool of mortal light begins.

Many have doubted, many refused to bend
To such simplicity, down on their knees
To make a fire. A flame blows in the wind

And casts for purchase in the night. To fend
Away the cold—time’s unremitting freeze—
There where the pool of mortal light begins

A solitary spark will do, to send
Illumination through the fallen trees.
To make a fire, a flame blows in the wind,

And neither rain nor drifted snow can mend
The broken branch. Yet more than shadows weave,
There where the pool of mortal light begins
To make a fire. A flame blows in the wind.

First published in The Formalist

(Blue Unicorn)

(Light: A Quarterly of Light Verse)

(The Chariton Review & The Art of Writing & Others)

Love without Sex

How do they do it, the ones

who make love

without love?

—Sharon Olds

(Timber Creek Review & The Art of Writing & Others)

Another Art

(After Elizabeth Bishop)

(The Neovictorian/Cochlea & The Art of Writing & Others)

Culling

(Whole Notes & Grounded)

 

 

 

 

Season

(First prize, 2001 Raintown Review Poetry Contest)

Tabula Rasa

(published in The NeoVictorian)

Rooms

Reverie

(published in Romantics Quarterly)

Your Melting Sky 

Now, as both owners’ and their slaves'
descendents and mixed heirs,
we waltz our souls on tops of graves
undaunted by their cares.
We dress as young as Innocence,
and, under Institutions’ name,
have lazy brother Ignorance
absolve our selves from facts, and blame.

The frock they bear, impervious,
cloaks us from visibility
while we go on a shopping spree
and Chinese children slave for us
on a far-off assembly line
to make us two for ninety-nine.

Mother

You can almost see it in the lines across her face:
Her heart’s been rent so often that I guess her mind’s unsound,
What with no mere brood of children but the onset of a race
Whom she can't stop from wreaking havoc all around the place
    (The Father being nowhere to be found).

Last week she had to let a little fire out with the steam;
The next day she exploded in a sudden, wicked storm;
Then yesterday, was pent up in a rage and split a seam,
The image of her children still reminding her of Him.
    She’s calm now (though for winter, it seems warm).

Will her children heed her temper? Will we listen by tomorrow?
Will her Love, their Father, come back in Time, as planned?
Will she drown in her tears, an ocean rising with her sorrow,
    Or just explode (which I would understand)?

Structure

The Roman arch seems supported by air
and carries water, wagons, and upper stories
even to this day. While some have crumbled
particularly as the late empire was humbled
Italy is yet filled with ample glories
of surviving structures almost everywhere.

The Indian arrow—feathered at one end
with the other pointed—scudded through the air.
When you walk in the woods in New England,
you can still find flints, sometimes stained with blood,
though not the feathers, or the shafts of whittled wood.
And you know that all were designed and honed with care
to do something, to go somewhere, to bring
through storms and times, beyond a wilderness,
a trace of whoever made some things—something.
Their fallen stones meant more than to express
and since their flight have managed to withstand.

I am Italian and American,
Irish, too, and German—actually Prussian—
each part contributing something: the Italian, song;
the Irish, if not the mystical then verboseness;
the Prussian, a need to keep busy, the need relentless;
the American, a desire to get along.
And so my cells already had a history
before their notion of assembling into me
as a bridge to carry something, a tissue
or network of tissues, or arrow to be flung
as text to be read or recited, song to be sung,
ordered expressiveness to present to you. . . .

And words and notes have been my wood and stone,
subjected to discipline as I’ve tried to hone
them in the hope a missile graze a cheek
or reach a heart that, flinching, feels me there:
or else some later age’s woman or man
might come upon it when we’re both long gone
and rub its side for the solace they might seek,
or pocket it while on a jaunt somewhere
so they might simply know that I was near,
and some of me remains, and it is here:
in their pocket, the words, the notes, and in the air.

Better

Better a wail should burst and be misread
    as fury in the swelling of an urge
than overhear, “I thought that he was dead.”
    Better to lay a life along a verge

than in the ground, to holler in a crowd,
    I am I want I’m here and love—love you—
unwisely long, embarrassingly loud.
    Better especially if it is true.

Better to undertake a dream and burn
    from failure, leaving ash for others’ raking
into a shelved commemorative urn,
    than suit it for another’s undertaking.

Better to fright the world with bolts of thunder
    by popping pent-up thunderheads within.
Better than understanding’s standing under
    and in—albeit in danger, or in sin—
to bellow and be reckoned, risk and blunder—
    even if reputation’s ripped asunder
instead of made. That would be better than
    no name at all. But how do I begin?
Better if you show me how you began.

Solution

With potent potions
shake well
then take.
With potent notions
take well
then shake
perhaps, that is, when they’re
their best
and if you
swallow properly
not mixing in too
much air.
To see
if you do
there’s a test:
they should be
easy
to take, not to
digest.
 

Drive up to where the smooth road takes a bend.
A peep-look in the rear-view has you knowing
corn-poppy, much behind is what’s ahead
to venture forth into a landscape flowing
table-lakes where you gamble for an end
from a road that knows now where it’s going:
don’t deliberate but turn instead
into a future that a past contrived.

Let it deliver you, fading into old
white, thatch-roof cottages of rambling farms
carved into shape by church or pagan pillage;
and let a mother-meadow’s ambling arms
embrace your no-direction hillocks, rolled
up into the parcel-prospect of a village;
unpack and shack up here, knowing
in all of this you have at last arrived.

The Kenchyn Girl

Our thick, imagined forest finds
the Kenchyn girl out mushrooming;
neat, curious, folk-pattern dressed,  
attentive to the distant wolf-howl,
flash of fox in dusk hush looming,

what wind-drop in a melting snow
reveals in hum-snatch song along:
an amber twinkling in the dark
is gem to catch her satin interest.
Peeling back the sapling bark

she sees the German helmet sunk
moss-covered deep into the mud,        
then rusty rails in bent direction,
as instinct offers her the bearing
to the grass-grown-over granite:

not what was once upon a clearing
but bent steel thick rusting rods
so twisted up to grasp the sky
that giants must have rested here
till driven out by warring Gods.

A wisdom in home-going song
is telling parents what she saw:
this was Wolf-Hitler’s lair, his
concrete fortress, till his hunters
trapped him in the Berlin bunker.

She too young to catch the fact:
bombs ripped this concrete apart;
the wolf escaped—that we know—
but deep in her Slavonic heart
an insight she is not far wrong.

Flinders Shore

Ships, in your knots of journey
untangled by the guessing tide—
what purpose to be born, built
in a miniscule, a distant Britain
too busy in her shifting history
to know what rock unlocks, silt
in a sea-weed rot reveals, your
reasons meant, unwritten on
this rich irrationale of shore.

Here, on a face of cave, turf
for the stallion race of wave
punched out of cliff,  drilled
by the whip and slap of surf
knuckle-bone ocean stones
konk on the planks for days,

echo the step of press-gangs
and their rap on tavern door
to round up men for voyages,
bringing the gossip-maze, salt
of old conversation over ales
to whispering and sudden halt.

Waves, in your restless turning—
in long insomnia of sea—what
bad dreams are you driven by
to buck tall ships of tar, cargo,
letters of illicit love and hidden            
prison notes, allow the dives
of your deep currents forage,
cull in a spread-wide farrago
for solumn secrets of our lives?
 

The Shed

There was a sabre in the shed—
I didn’t know what meant—
along with garden tools
that Dad had kept
perhaps as monument,
reminder of his dead
mates in New Guinea.
“Fifteen of us would go
out into jungle where
guns, big-fist rats
and Japanese were
waiting in the trees—
and only five come back.
But, for the moment, that’s
enough of that,” he said,
 “it’s time for tea.”

Was potting round that lead
me to it—kid curiosity—
its falling from the tall
shelf let me see the faded
Melbourne Herald,
headline print gone brown
announcing War.  Dad
didnt use it for the fires
of barbeques he had
for friends, unless the flames
would light up, funeral pyres
in dedication to his dead
mates in New Guinea.
“Some even drowned—
enough of that,” he said,
“it’s time for tea.”
 

[After “The Revolutionary” by D.H.Lawrence]

The Dark Ray

I want to learn from journal editors
The art of writing verse that opens doors
To publication in those highbrow pages
Where free-verse fever has become contagious.

One helpful editor in guidelines said she
Seeks poems that take risks, are bold, are . . . ED-GY,

                                                    t
                                             n
                                       u
That dare to      f l a 

                    a frac   /   tured
                                                                  set
                                                      of
              lines
And
            T
                R
                    O
                        M
                             P
                                 on all accepted auld lang synes,

That sing off key, that act as arsonist,
And make of creativity a fist
To bust up order, form, and expectations,
Bamboozle old-guard readers, try their patience.

“The poet, to be published, innovates,”
She said.  “You should not look to Frost or Yeats,
Or fret if no one gets your drift.  Just please your
Self.  Toss wild words.  Achieve a grand mal seizure.”

I listened well.  I want to learn the shtick
Of swimming with the fognoscenti [sic],
Pretending I’m an enigmatic squid in
Creative clouds of ink, securely hidden.

I’m eager now to find my unique voice.
I’ll first warm up, and then I’ll make a choice:
Do re mi fa sol la ti do . . .  I say!
I think I’m ready.  Where’s my pen?  Allez!

First published in Words-Myth, 2008
 

Pathology Lab

The newly bared contents of this man’s brain:
The foul effluvia, the brilliant hues,
The tiny pots and tubes that slowly lose
Their useless liquid to the suction drain.
The skull’s grey bone beneath the flap of skin
Is widely notched by humming circle saw,
Revealing to the practiced eye the flaw
That killed in spite of every medicine.

Is cancer all pathologists could find?
Shakespeare’s plays he knew, and Helen’s face,
Beethoven, prayers, the evening sun.  Could these
Afflict the man but leave no scar behind?
I hate that thing that cannot save a trace
Of art or love but hoards its own disease.

First published in Fifth Wednesday, 2008
 

The Relic in the Weeds

A curious whim brought me back home to find
Pa’s double-bottom plow.  Its blades gleamed bright
In summers past, harsh-burnished by the grind
Of turning sod from dawn until last light.
Behind the barn, this relic hides in weeds,
No longer bright, nor hitched to Belgians now,
Fully retired—no commerce left with seeds.
The same with Pa:  he’s resting like his plow.
They struggled breaking ground that gave them life
Till Pa himself became a bright plowshare,
Knife-sharp, deep-honed with sun and rub and strife,
Devoutly plowing on, as if in prayer.
“Don’t look back,” Jesus to the plowman said.
Pa set his mind on furrows straight ahead.

First published in Utmost Christian Writers, 2008
 

Paths

My walking round this farm makes paths in weeds.
Observers might conclude I’ve been confined
Along each path, to follow where it leads.

Yes, naturally, when walking, I’m inclined
To follow safely where I’ve gone before.
I could, if needed, walk those paths bat-blind.

One morning strolling toward the barn to chore,
I had a troubling thought.  Did mind, like feet,
Prefer a lock-step down a corridor?

Later, I chewed on this while shocking wheat,
And wondered if a new thought ever came
To me—but who could think in all that heat?

Come cooler weather, it will be my aim
To ponder newness:  why do people throw
Away the old, however good, in shame

For entertaining thoughts hatched long ago.
I call to mind the times when I’ve been told
Not to be satisfied with comme il faut.

I think I’ll ask myself if I’ve been sold
A bill of goods about the new and old?

First published in Word Catalyst Magazine, 2008
 

My Friend’s Advice

You say my poems are too commonplace.
Forget old farms, you say, and turn to face
Reality—today’s problems and needs.
The now, you say, is what I should embrace.
Find cause, you say, and follow where it leads,
Call out for action to correct misdeeds,
And deconstruct society’s decay:
This is the way a budding poet succeeds.
Don’t mess with horses, cows, and pigs, you say,
Get with modernity, and, by the way,
Abandon meter, lose that old quaint rhyme—
For God’s sake, man, you’re nothing but cliché . . .
I hear you, friend, appreciate your dime’s
Worth, and I’ll think on it when I get time.
 

Still Pursuing Truth

The lodestar, faint, elusive in the night,
Disappearing in the glare of day,
Puts me in mind of Truth, who does not stay.
She whispers; when I turn, she’s not in sight.
Much like shy nymph or wary woodland sprite,
Truth, lovely in revealing disarray,
Is wary of her suitor, slips away.
When boldest, still she flutters, poised for flight.

I once had hopes that I could seize her heart
By claiming to be through with whores.  I’d add
That I am studying theology,
That I will burn my Nietzsche and my Sartre.
Alas, she sees right through this faithless cad
Who lies—still lies—with Relativity.

First published in Word Catalyst Magazine, 2008
 

from "Word from the Hills: A Sonnet Sequence in Four Movements"

                                  1.
 
The wind is blowing through the blighted birch.
Its wormy leaves all toss with gay abandon.
Father, you planted it the year Alf Landon
fought for the good old days.  I watch it lurch
beside your hillhouse, where you let me perch,
and still the parlor-pinks and liberals land in
the Government, the moon, this field I stand in;
the rights of man scream from each Negro church.
 
You loved our town, our little feudal fief
ruled by the rich grocer, accomplished thief
and friend of yours.  You worshiped the same god,
and yet, father, you never tried his beef.
Now with black maggots crawling on each leaf,
your creamy birch creaks, rotten in its clod.
 
 
                                  4.
 
Nobody’s here; nobody but the wind.
Over the meadow changing with the hours,
where brooks lie under snow with grass and flowers,
from time to time it blows a leaf, unpinned
from forest crowding in, undisciplined,
to fill this emptiness you say is ours.
But father, have you spoken with the powers
that haunt here now?  They watched us come and grinned.
 
Nobody’s lived here, where the road ascends
the hill and disappears—and here it ends:
a house, with a few saplings poking forth
from the lost ground below, and for their friends,
the wind and the deep cold—which buckles, bends,
and half the stone foundation inches north.
 

                                  10.
 
She is the neighbor’s sister’s bastard daughter
adopted to these hills.  No one can guess,
except Americans, what sordidness
goes with infrequent use of soap and water.
This little girl, who watches daddy slaughter
the autumn pig and has a bad abscess
in her new tooth, holes in her party dress,
and no wheels on the bike her daddy bought her—
 
what will become of her?  In muddy boots
among the fenders, tires, and inner tubes
of daddy’s junkyard, rotting without roots,
she skips, a little witch among the boobs.
This land has no use for its brightest shoots.
She’ll marry, since we outlaw prostitutes.
 
 
                                  28.
 
One day at nightfall, when thick fog revealed,
by barbed wire fence, a tree trunk, more or less,
which dripped out of its upper nothingness
into a lane and cattle-gutted field,
and even the near neighbor’s lights were sealed
behind a mask of space and timelessness,
leaving the desolation to confess
a fender, lying like a broken shield—
 
like war, I thought—the horror fields of France.
A shell hole, once a ploughed-out cattle pond,
confronted me…and when I tried to lance
my flashlight beam, waving it like a wand,
into the drifting mist and break the trance,
it pointed nowhere.  Nothing was beyond.

 
                                   48.
 
I often think about these twilight years
of mass murders and race-staggering crimes
and slower death in empty pantomimes
of sentiment, from which a horror leers;
but most I think of one recorded queer’s
velvety vocals, who a thousand times
has crooned emasculated nursery rhymes
into our daughters’ young and helpless ears.
 
In the beginning men were not estranged
from the earth spirits.  Shelterless and dumb
over uncultivated lands they ranged,
uncursed by crooners.  To the hollow drum
century followed century unchanged,
and men knew what their daughters would become.
 
 
                                    52.
 
With its great belly heaving, cracked and bruised
from the frost’s push, sore from the ice’s sting,
slowly the earth emerges into spring.
Under the brook-loud hills today, it oozed
at every step, and not a sod refused
my boot’s print.  Long imprisoned waters swing
out over sunny meadows, glittering.
The dark tunnels beneath cave in, unused.
 
What if they do, father?  See: dying sun,
striking across the hillsides, has begun
to shape with shadows every mound and hummock.
No one can guess what the deep frost has done.
From steps on the dry road, dark trickles run;
stiff gravel gives, like walking on a stomach.
 
 

(Originally published by The University of Georgia Press, 1972)
 
 
 
 

 

At dawn I took my boat and crossed
Over to Sonora Island.  No one
Lives there now since the last logger
Left, and the young firs and pines
Hide the deer well.  I held my gun
Loose as I hiked a road long lost
In moss and nettles, watchful for signs
Of deer.  I never heard the cougar.

I was the only man on the island
That day in November.  It felt good
To walk alone into the breeze
And drizzle, kicking away the brown
Alder leaves blown from the wood
To the path.  Where a creek spanned
The road I paused, and knelt down
To drink.  Something made me freeze.

Slowly, slowly, I turned.  The great cat
Who followed behind was watching me.
He crouched low and long on the road,
Low and long and golden against
The leaves, watching pensively,
A damp sphinx of the woods.  He sat
So still, tail sinuous, that I sensed
He could watch me forever; or explode.

Meant for the moon, those yellow eyes
Glowing through the pale light of noon,
Those eyes meant to prowl the dark
Met mine in mutual appraisal—
One man on an island paused to commune
With one cat.  I spoke first.  “A wise
Cat does not trifle with a loaded rifle.”
He listened quietly to my remark.

But the cat did not bother to answer.  
I aimed, and touched the trigger, waiting—
For what, I could not say.  A man,
A cat, we shared some time alone;
I lowered my gun, reciprocating
His silent gaze. The golden panther
Moved off through the trees, and was gone.
I camped there, and listened to the quiet rain.
 

 Controlled Flight Into Terrain

Dawn up above, fog set afire below
and no one else aloft to watch it all—
could be I’ve died, gone back to long ago
when great birds flew, when earth was virginal—
the mist dissolves the way a silken nightdress
flutters undone, my airplane’s shadow races
up the wild river—oh, I pity flightless
mortals left back asleep in human places!
This one last wilderness and open sky
belong to me—the spawning salmon lead
me on a spirit flight, skimming upstream
into a Chinese landscape scene where I
see snow-brushed mountain ledges blurred by speed
then touch the overhanging pines and dream….
 

 In Vain He Mocks the Fine Spring Day

An early spring can be a bitter season.
Another hot short year is torn from earth,
Another piece of rhyme breaks loose from reason—
Neither one I count a thing of worth.
This laurel tree, all gnarled and stripped of bark,
Has now seen fifty springs; and so have I.
The tree tries on its fine green leaves to mark
The year’s rebirth—I sit beneath and cry.

The daffodils are always first to flaunt
Their moist and slender stems, their golden faces;
“Withered old crones within the month,” I taunt—
“The scythe will hack your last pathetic traces.”
The bees are nuzzling flowers to gather pollen;
“You work and die, my friends, so why be gay?”
I wonder though, has my own joy been stolen,
Or did I somehow give it all away?

The honest blast of winter does not chill
The heart as does this breeze that masquerades
As warm caress—I’ve surely had my fill
Of springtime sun, and long for when it fades.
But even now the pale bare-breasted moon
Is laughing at me through the harsh daylight:
“Don’t hurry sundown, dusk will come too soon—
This spring the day is kinder than the night.”
 

 Water Rights

Crossing high Nevada desert I came
To some hardscrabble town set in a waste
Where long ago a miner staked his claim.
A road to nowhere—just some trailers braced
Against the desiccating wind, gas station,
Church, post office, tyrannized by sun
Year after year.  Amid that desolation
Water was almost never seen to run—
Except in one small irrigated patch
Of lawn where rows of planted willows shaded
Marble slabs, green guardians keeping watch
Above townsfolk who’d lived, and loved, then faded.
    The living thirst for water, yet instead
    Take greater comfort moistening their dead.